Verso
An interactive notebook platform and an embeddable .NET execution engine. Eight language kernels share one variable store, and every feature, including the built-in ones, is an extension.
The problem it solves
Understanding data is iterative. You load something, look at it, reshape it, and look again, and the fastest loop wins. Python developers have had that loop in a notebook for a decade. .NET developers had a console app and a debugger, and the notebooks that existed were a place to run code, not an engine to build on.
Verso is that notebook, and the engine underneath it is an ordinary .NET library you can embed anywhere.
What Verso is
A C# cell hands a table to a Python cell or a SQL cell without serialization, because the kernels share one variable store. The same engine runs in VS Code, in the browser through verso serve, and in the terminal for CI. Notebooks are saved as .verso, .ipynb, or plain .md, and .dib files import directly.
The notebook surface itself is a layout, and layouts are extensions. The showcase ships a dashboard, a slide deck, a spreadsheet, a reactive graph, and an image compositor, each rebuilding the surface into something else on the same public interfaces.
If the extension surface is not good enough for our own features, it is not good enough to ship.
Compared with
Where Verso sits next to the notebooks .NET developers already know.
| Verso | Polyglot Notebooks | Jupyter | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Languages | C#, F#, Python, SQL, HTTP, PowerShell, JavaScript, Markdown | C#, F#, PowerShell, SQL, KQL, JavaScript, HTML, and more | Any language with a kernel, one kernel per notebook |
| Variable sharing | One store; every kernel reads and writes it directly | Explicit #!share, copying a value between kernels | None across kernels |
| Surfaces | VS Code, browser, terminal, CI | VS Code; Jupyter front ends through .NET Interactive | JupyterLab, VS Code, and others |
| Embeddable engine | Yes, an ordinary NuGet library | Hostable, but built as a kernel process | Kernel process |
| Replaceable surface | Yes, layouts are extensions | No | No |
| Formats | .verso, .ipynb, .md; imports .dib | .ipynb, .dib | .ipynb |
| License | MIT | MIT | BSD |
Where it fits
The Datafication SDK loads and shapes the data. Verso is where you look at it. Motus proves what the notebook produced in a real browser, and it is what we use to test Verso's own browser host.
Specifications
Get Verso
dotnet tool install -g Verso.Clidotnet add package Verso